True Colors

Slow down, I thought.Step back.
Take a look before it all goes black.
Heavy heart, troubled mind.
Nothing worse than running blind.
What am I feeling?
It’s too soon to know.

— scribbled in a notebook while I was dating the subject of the angry poem that follows

Too soon?
Yeah, too soon.
I barely knew who you were, all right,
and now that I’ve seen your true colors I’m repulsed.
Beneath the flaky gold varnish I cringe at what’s beneath:
a fleshy mass of yellow, diseased tissue,
tinged green
and laced with veins of red
–scars that still bleed–
trembling like jello
and barely holding itself together.
I pity it.
I pity you.

Good luck with your future endeavors.
No sarcasm. I mean it.
I hope that by the time you find your soulmate,
you’ve had time to heal,
so she doesn’t see the ugly mess I’ve seen.
I hope you can hold it together with her
better than you did with me,
better than you did with the others,
because no girl deserves to be the victim of your insecurity,
least of all her.

I have no regrets, but I hope you do:
The first step to healing is admitting you’re sick.
You’re sick, boy, more sick than you know,
That ragged tear through your heart never closed.
Every breath you take rips apart the slowly repairing flesh yet again,
Till the newly opened wound
Aches.
Throbs.
Festers.
You tell yourself it’s over,
You tell yourself she’s gone.
I barely know you, and
Even I know better–
You’re not over it.
Her shadow still hovers over you,
And you’ve absorbed that darkness into your soul.
It’s twisted you, boy–just look, you’ll see.
And you have no right to take that out on me.

Good luck to you, boy.
I wish you the best.
Get well soon, heal,
Move on, live your life,
And learn to care without hurting those around you.
You’ll be better off for it,
The girls you pursue in the future will thank you for it,
And your true colors will shine through:
A deep clover green and a rich, warm gold,
Waving proudly in the wind.

I, too, was once one of those people who didn’t “get” poetry (I still don’t, half the time) but my college Spanish Lit class changed my mind. Poetry is a weird art form — all the standards we uphold in prose are chucked out the window and replaced with another set of values from out of the blue. Strange, I say. For me, though, the most important aspect is emotion, so I’m glad that came across to you.